In our fast-paced society, people often encounter a lot of stress and exhaustion that will degrade their quality of life. Having a pet is one of the best ways to improve not only your emotional but also physical health. A lovely pet can help reduce your stress, enhance social connections and mitigate the effect of some allergies. Diana Pet Food understands that more and more urban residents are having pets as family members; therefore seeking more products and services to support their pets’ life.

In 1990, Diana Ingredients was founded as a division of the food group Guyomarc'h. From an ingredients supplier, Diana has been expanding to three business units: Food - Pet Food - Nova (aquaculture and plant cell culture) and rebranded as Diana Group in 2011. Being present in 5 continents with over 950 employees, Diana Pet Food provides multiple solutions to improving pets’ well being and owners’ satisfaction. Diana Pet Food includes 5 different expert brands, each of which focuses on a specific area in pet food manufacturers or pet care business:

The Challenge

With the popularity of WeChat in China, it is essential to leverage brands' online presence on this platform to raise brand awareness, gain as many quality leads as possible, and even use it as a gateway for launching events. For Western brands entering China, it may be challenging to take proper actions on WeChat without the help of an experienced agency, especially for technical developments.

In this case, Diana Pet Food wanted to hold a conference to launch a new Pet Food product in China, called 福味多 fú wèi duō - New Pet Food Enhancer. The invitation would be sent to around 200 attendees, containing a trial package of 2 types of pet-food flavor enhancers: the traditional product and the new one. Therefore, Diana Pet Food's objective was to obtain leads for this product launching conference, and at the same time, increasing the number of followers for its WeChat account.

The Solution

ITC was trusted to bring this campaign into life, while Nude, a creative agency in Shanghai, was assigned the conceptualization of the campaign and was in charge of the press release conference.

This campaign was to promote a brand new innovative product of Diana Pet Food - New Pet Food Enhancer. The main characteristic of this product is that it smells good for both pets and their owners, so that pet owners would not feel uncomfortable when feeding their pets. Therefore, the big idea of this campaign was to emphasize on the innovation of this new product compared to the traditional one.

The invitation leading to a WeChat bot was designed as a pet face with QR codes.

In order to implement this idea, a 2-sided printed invitation was prepared and sent to prospective attendees. Each side of the invitation featured 2 different QR codes linked to WeChat bot.

On one side of the invitation, the customers would see a YES option with a happy pet face and a QR code. This side represents the new product that smells good for both pets and their owners. When customers scan the YES QR code using WeChat app, they will follow Diana Pet Food&rsquo;s WeChat account, while being presented with a series of questions asking them to provide information such as name and company.

On the other side, there would be a NO option with a sad pet face and another QR code. This side represents the traditional product. When scanning the QR code, customers also follow Diana Pet Food's WeChat account, but the conversation will start with a nice video and some questions to persuade the customers to come to the product release event. If the customers change their mind, they will start the registration for the event by providing information.

To help the client digitalize this campaign, ITC provided customized QR code for two scenarios - YES and NO. Then, we needed to design a WeChat bot to ask and collect answers from customers when they scan the QR code and interact with the WeChat public account. The flow of the WeChat Bot was carefully designed to ensure the most natural conversation with customers.

The WeChat bot was developed using PHP powered framework Laravel. Anar, a Backend Developer who participated in the development of the WeChat bot, said that:

For this project, we aimed to build a strong backend for the chatbot to ensure a seamless experience for the users. PHP powered framework Laravel were used because they are flexible and highly secure. They are simply the most suitable technologies for API-based projects.

In this WeChat campaign, there were 2 different QR codes with different flows of questions; therefore, we needed to develop a special decision tree algorithm to make sure the conversation would go in the most logical directions. Besides, when creating a WeChat Bot, it is important to give your bot a personality to make the conversation go in a natural way, so to increase the engagement level with customers and encourage them to provide us information.

Regarding the most challenging technical part in this project, Anar said:

The hardest part was to integrate the chatbot in WeChat. There were many different event types coming from WeChat API such as sending location, text, images or audio messages. Therefore, every question had to be connected to the right event types to ensure users could not answer a text for a question asking for an image, which helped the chatbot store the right information in our database. This WeChat bot was hosted on our server so whenever we received an HTTP request from WeChat, we would send another request to its server. In other words, every time customers scanned the QR code, a new user with the information inputted would be created in the database. All scans were recorded in the system, so we could understand more about the user behavior when he/she interacted with the QR codes.

The Result

The implementation of QR code and WeChat bot was an optimal solution for Diana Pet Food to promote its new product by increasing numbers of followers and attracting attendees to the product launch event. This campaign helped Diana Pet Food reach its customers easily and increase the engagement by making the process of user onboarding more conversational with WeChat bot.

Thanks to this campaign, the new product release of Diana Pet Food went amazingly with:

200 people reached

35% engagement rate

85% positive answers

3 answers per person on average

A picture from the product release conference

This is what Benjamin Joly, General Manager Asia of Nude, thinks about this WeChat campaign:

I am very happy about how the project evolved and the final delivery. ITC showed great professionalism and ethics and worked together with us to deliver a top-quality development that surpassed the expected outcomes. I am more than happy to have had this chance to work together and hope many more will come.

Digital is becoming a central part for all FMCG companies and is a must-have marketing tool that is widely used in B2B. As a foreign B2B company with strong ambitions in China, Diana Pet Food wanted to focus on increasing its visibility within the booming pet food market worldwide.When we released the latest innovation FU WEI DUO, we expected the launching event to be big, make some noise and bring the spotlight to our company at the same time. When I presented the project to Nude and ITC, they immediately believed in the innovation we were offering and they were thrilled to support our project. The offline-to-online approach immediately seduced me because it was the perfect way to target our customers in a very personal way. By sending them nominative invitations, we could promote our WeChat official account with efficient promotional yet meaningful content.The intimacy of this campaign went from the fun invitations to the WeChat chatbot experience brilliantly managed by ITC, right to our launching event for our customers. The whole campaign enabled us to reach very high conversion rates, with 20% of prospects among all attendees. The project management went very smoothly in a good spirit with a strong support and availability of the teams. I will not hesitate to collaborate with Nude and ITC for future projects.